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George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

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Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#91

Post by blub »

tinus_hn wrote: post #90
sametmax wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I love Python, you need realtime processing for this kind of things. You can't have a slow language with gc pauses and no way to guaranty execution time for a given operation.

If you want to replace the always attentive driver who never blinks their eyes?

It's not necessarily about speed of reaction, although that certainly plays a part.

Such software needs to react in real time though, if the task that's turning the steering wheel gets preempted in the middle of taking a curve on a cliff your self-driving car will become a self-flying car.

Such a system would be the equivalent of a driver that suddenly starts texting at all sorts of poorly chosen times.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#92

Post by blub »

stevenwoo wrote: post #67
asteli wrote: post #30

Here's the low-level controller for Comma AI's self-driving software. Lateral and longitudinal control, as well as actuator command are contained within. Their low level control is done in Python, on top of Android, on a smartphone. No further comment, your honor. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/co...

In the 1980's the backup flight control software for landing the space shuttle ran on a HP-41 calculator, though they never had to use it AFAIK, with the multiple redundant onboard computers.

That's not what I found online: the devices running customized SW were apparently used as personal calculators by the crew and they would have also used them for manual calculation in case their flight computer had a problem.

They weren't connected to other shuttle computers, were they?

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#93

Post by bufferoverflow »

yters wrote: post #32

Brilliant! Pure AI is a dead end street. Turing machines cannot increase their minimal Kolmogorov sufficient statistic, so will always be unable to learn more information than is put into them originally. Humans are the only known information creators, and so only hybrid human/AI systems can work in the real world.

> Humans are the only known information creators

No. Evolution created RNA, DNA, all kinds of animal languages, both sound- and chemical-based.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#94

Post by qznc »

xedeon wrote: post #84
21 wrote: post #40

So now we'll have weekend "hackers" downloading this open source software, tweaking it, and hurling their cars down the road at high speed. Great. The system also seems to have a single front facing camera. How will this detect for example a cyclist riding along the car and prevent the car from turning into him?

You seem to have pretty strong opinions without even actually taking the time to look into comma.ai and how it works. All it takes is 5 minutes to know that it actually uses the built-in safety systems in cars like ADAS, LKAS, ACC. Hence, they only support only specific make/models. It's not just the "single front facing camera".

None of these built-in safety systems is design to work without a human driver having the actual responsibility. This is why e.g. ACC is a "comfort" system but not a "safety" system. Even systems like AEB don't come with a guarantee. They just might help.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#95

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

flippmoke wrote: post #26

If you are interested in learning more about George, you should listen to him talking at Mapbox's Locate conference with the Mapbox CEO, Eric Gundersen [1]. Its another example of George being George. I just happened to be called out during the talk, but overall rather enjoyed it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9WxlR1ZTZc

I found his description of his company, “ghost riding for the masses”, to be particularly amusing

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#96

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

I think that this being marketed as anything other than the next generation of cruise control is a lie. Don’t get me wrong, for that it’s absolutely great. I would pay for this kit (if my car was new enough to actually have software for it) just for the ability to be able to eat a sandwich on the way to work or cruise down the boring parts of E6 or I-10 in a more relaxed, reclined position.

I think Hotz is wrong about the predictions of self driving cars, but he doesn’t have to be right to make this business succeed in the medium term because he is filling an entirely different market niche here.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#97

Post by sametmax »

tinus_hn wrote: post #90
sametmax wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I love Python, you need realtime processing for this kind of things. You can't have a slow language with gc pauses and no way to guaranty execution time for a given operation.

If you want to replace the always attentive driver who never blinks their eyes?

It's more a matter of concurrency and blocking behavior. Gc blocks. A task you can't bound to an execution time blocks.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#98

Post by [deleted] »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #74
HALtheWise wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm... If you look in the actual lib/ directory where the work happens, you will see a bunch of high-performance C written in and generated by Acado, which is a very efficient optimization framework. It does look like there is a bunch of python logic for managing that controller, but a significant amount of work seems to have gone into performance optimization. I am curious how they prevent the Android GC from causi…

The Android ART GC doesn't cause "long pauses". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFE2Utbv1Oo

[deleted]

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#99

Post by blub »

nodnyl wrote: post #68
asteli wrote: post #30

Here's the low-level controller for Comma AI's self-driving software. Lateral and longitudinal control, as well as actuator command are contained within. Their low level control is done in Python, on top of Android, on a smartphone. No further comment, your honor. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/tree/devel/selfdrive/co...

As someone who has had a bit to do with safety critical software in agricultural machinery, and I am sure to any one in any other regulated industry this sounds crazy. The regulation in many industries for software that can kill is onerous, python on Android for any safety related code in other industries would be the punch line of a joke.

To clarify (as a safety hobbyist) why this is a problem:

* consumer hardware does not normally fulfil automotive safety requirements. It could for instance go into thermal shutdown or into a degraded mode if the temperature is too high. Additionally, there is no HW redundancy, I assume that if any of the HW components of the smartphone fail, the system cannot continue to maintain its safety properties.

* Android is a consumer OS, designed for consumer workloads. A real-time, safety certified OS like INTEGRITY, ThreadX, Nucleus etc should be typically used for such workloads.

* The safety-relevant software running on top of the OS is developed with specific toolchains and using specific programming languages. Some requirements [1] for a language used in safety-critical context are defined behaviour, explicit dependability support (e.g. design by contract), predictable timing, suitability for static verification, significant field use, strong typing (not necessarily static typing!), feasibility to restrict the language to a subset (e.g. MISRA, JSF, etc).

One of the most popular languages for such software is C, which is not safe and doesn't fulfil several of the above criteria. This is mitigated through tooling, processes, code generation, design validation & verification and so on.

[1]: Taken from Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems, Hobbs. Interestingly the author would personally choose D or Rust for safety-critical development with the condition of having enough confidence in the compilers.

Re: George Hotz is on a hacker crusade against the ‘scam’ of self-driving cars

#100

Post by orbifold »

commaai wrote: post #71
HALtheWise wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm... If you look in the actual lib/ directory where the work happens, you will see a bunch of high-performance C written in and generated by Acado, which is a very efficient optimization framework. It does look like there is a bunch of python logic for managing that controller, but a significant amount of work seems to have gone into performance optimization. I am curious how they prevent the Android GC from causi…

There's no Android GC, there's a Java GC. Python on Android isn't written in Java, it's CPython, written in C. Python has a GC as well, but we turn it off for the control loop processes. https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/devel/selfdrive/co... Haters love to bring up the Python, but they never stick around long enough to explain exactly why it's a problem.

Lack of type safety and static analysis tools. You can't apply formal verification to it. I wouldn't sit in a car in which any safety critical component was driven by python. Hopefully you would also not be able to get it certified for road use. I happen to know people that work on these problems for German automotive companies. This wouldn't fly there. I truly hope that solid engineering wins out over these approaches. That being said I admire the audacity.
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